I have a long interest in legal oddities; and no, I don’t regard the death penalty as one.
It is a humorous internet tradition to make lists of such things, but the examples usually alleged in that sense are often historical and since repealed, or completely false.
I thus wanted to make my own list that is 100% true:
1) In South Korea, a country above 50 million inhabitants, the President of the Republic is elected by direct universal suffrage.
Article 67 of the Constitution provides how to break a tie.
The solution is a vote of the National Assembly.
But what to do if a tie happened at the Assembly, that’s not said; although it is said for a legislative bill at Article 49: it is defeated.
2) In Japan, Article 179 of the statute about prisons specifies that when executing the death penalty, the hanged convict shall be unhanged five minutes after his death has been confirmed by the doctor.
3) In the state of New York, you can appeal from the Supreme Court to the Court of Appeals.
Maybe that this term come from historical origins, when it truly was a "supreme" court, and the Court of Appeals above it was created thereafter. But then, why not changing its name at the same time?
Why not, indeed, correct this mistake and changing its name at any time, for the sake of clarity?
One will answer: because the court is provided by the state constitution, and modifying it requires a statewide referendum, an awesome remedy for such a non-issue.
But in 2001, the state of New York held such a referendum for an even lesser important issue: making the constitutional text sex-neutral.
Much like Rhode Island, which held two referendums in 2010 and 2020 to abandon its original official name "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations", and only the second was successful. And California, which held in 2016 a referendum on requiring adult film performers to use condoms, which was defeated.
4) The French and German current constitutions were both published with a grammatical mistake. A consolation for many, including myself.
5) Because of the placement of the commas, the U.S. Constitution literally says that only persons who were citizens at the time of its adoption are eligible to the U.S. Presidency.
6) The U.S. Constitution grants to the Supreme Court original jurisdiction for some cases.
That means that if a common law, rather than an equity original suit, were ever brought to the court, the parties would be entitled to a trial by jury.
There are other things like the death penalty that can be presented as weird, but personally I don’t.
Another example is that to be elected pope, one needs only to be a baptized male, but neither to be a cardinal, a bishop, nor even a priest. That’s the only (and tiny) democratic element in the Church government.
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